As PMF has matured throughout the years a discernible shift occurred where usability and overall cohesiveness was placed as a cornerstone of development. We have added many new features to the latest release of 521 including a new Dashboard designer, Broadcast capabilities and tight Flex integration to name just a few. Don’t worry as we aren’t stopping there. PMF 522 plans to be even better!

In this series I will discuss these new features along with other related PMF goodies. By a better understanding of our architecture I hope you will feel comfortable and empowered to customize your interfaces with PMF to create new and exciting implementations. After all PMF is made with WebFOCUS, a developer dream. Perhaps you will even learn to create a gadget template that you can package up and send to other developers or even simply attach it to Focal Point for sharing. This is a very exciting prospect if you think about it – a grand collaboration.

Dashboard breakdown
To get a better understanding of the PMF dashboard we first must look at the component architecture involved. A Today Page Dashboard is made up of individual gadget components. At a high level the dashboard page keeps track of all the active gadgets visible and manages a cache of information for improved performance. Each gadget is in reality an instance of a super class. The super class specifies the content to be displayed such as whether it is a FOCEXEC, Web Page or a Flex object. This super class or better known as a gadget class also specifies what parameters are allowed such as whether it allows filters, display fields and what type of report sorting you would like used. By using a super class in this manner it allows all users to create individual instances or what you may think of as preferences that always follow the gadget class rules. This is the basis for how the 52x broadcast capability works by linking up the like parameters between gadgets on a page. The gadget class content which is usually a FOCEXEC or Flex object is what actually is executed during runtime and this is where your development customizations should be made.

This was a high level glance of the PMF dashboard. In the next series I will delve further into the many components available. If you have any thoughts or questions on anything mentioned, please let me know.

Best regards,
Michael Paul
Senior Software Developer
WebFOCUS Performance Management

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Bob Jude Ferrante,